On a trip to the Townships

Two weeks ago, I rented a car to get Leonardo out to North Hatley for the 2008 edition of the Défi des Cantons de l'Est or Eastern Townships Challenge. On the Saturday, Mummy and I went to Cowansville for the start. Mummy, was quite proud of her new Devinci bike.
Between a semi-sloshed disassembly, a plane ride and reassembly, I think I may have slightly damaged the rear derailleur on Leonardo. In any case, decided not to go too far (only a 100 km) as the bike wasn't performing up to its potential.
This had the advantage of putting me on a very nice (for Quebec) bit of open road.
The horizon just called to brought forth.

The next day, I stopped by to see my niece. She had grown some since I last saw her. More significantly, she has learned to locomote, after a fashion.
When she wants to get somewhere, she will push herself up... and roll over!!!
It seems to be a bit of a challenge for Philip and Dominique to keep her on her play area (an unzipped sleeping bag.) While she can locomote, she isn't very good at getting anywhere in particular. Consequently, she has to be replaced at the center of the sleeping bag every so often.There is a bit of jealousy from Happy the cocker spaniel. Nothing major, but it seems obvious that he isn't 100% happy about the new arrival. He was rather disappointed that I didn't take him for walkies (as I often do) when I was there. I probably should have taken him for a walk, but I had other things to do that day.

It was really special to see her growth. The last time I had seen her, she was a bit of a blob. Now she is really starting to acknowledge her environment. She had started eating "solid" food. She was locomoting (after a fashion). Very neat to watch.

You can see more baby pictures here.

On Bonne Bay, Sailing

The day after the beach party,
...Alice,

...Mark,
...Jason and...
and I went sailing on the Eastern Arm of Bonne Bay. The boat we did it in was the Moonshadow, a 17 foot "micro-cruiser" known as a Siren 17. In case you are wondering, that was the name of the boat when Alice and Mark bought it, so they can't be accused of ripping off Cat Stevens.

Unusually for the "tropical" island of Newfoundland, the weather was very nice with lots of sun and a very suitable amount of wind for the day.
Having biking two thousand odd kilometers to get there, I was relatively loath to do much work, especially as I suspect that my rating in the Royal Navy of Nelson's day would be at best be "common seaman". Also, four adults is almost too much for a siren 17. Consequently, I tried to keep my role to (semi)-mobile ballast and "protect" the fiberglass from the ultra-violet light (i.e. catch some rays).As you can see from this picture, I did need some UV in certain parts such as my upper thighs that were hidden by my bike shorts. I had (and still have) quite the cyclist's tan.

Getting back to naval ratings, we had a discussion about who would qualify as what rating. "Obviously" Alice was a Captain, and Mark the mate. I initially put Jason in the "Landsman" rating given his accounts of being a duffer in boats, until I heard he taught sailing at the school he worked at. I think we ended up referring to him as an "able seaman".

We sailed to some beach whose name I've forgotten but I doubt is truly important. Some of us (including me) went swimming.
The water temperature was actually quite nice. In some respects, this was rather surprising as the Eastern Arm of Bonne Bay has some surprising features to it. Apparently, the lower depths of it feature permanently cold water of an Arctic character. As in, they support marine fauna and flora usually found in Arctic waters. There is some rather interesting physics and chemistry that explains why the deep water of the Eastern Arm hasn't warmed up since the last ice age, but I am unable to repeat it as it is more complicated than I can easily explain. Also, while it made sense to me when I read it, I don't know enough about the subject to say that I truly understood it. The short version is warmish water on top, very cold water beneath.

The bottom of the Moonshadow was relatively foul with marine growth, so Mark decided to careen her. Lacking a proper tool, he used one of his Newfoundland wool socks to do the job. There are a number of disturbing things about this. First of all, I doubt he is the first person to use Newfy socks for more or less this purpose. Secondly, I suspect that the socks were none the worse for wear. Thirdly, it shows a rather odd feature of Mark's personality. If he had been born in this country, it would be very easy to describe him as something of a hoser, given his use of socks for cleaning boats and a tendency to wear boots all the time and drink beer. However, he's vegatarian doctor from the Island of Jersey, for Christ's sake. Something don't add up. (And I say this with all due affection.) ;-)

Anyway, we sailed back and went for supper at Java Jack's.

My take on Java Jack's is that it takes reasonably available ingredients (remember this is Newfoundland after all, you aren't going find a lot of exotic food) and does very interesting things with them. For instance, the menu features yin yang pizza. This is a pizza that is half pesto and half a more conventional tomato. Obviously, the ingredients of pizza dough are something of a given. Garlic, cheese and tomatoes are also fairly obvious. (The basil comes from their own herb garden.) Hence, most of the ingredients are "common". In another restaurant, they might be put together in a very conventional, if not bland manner. However, at Java Jack's, the execution of the dish is very recherché.

I had been tempted to have a Newfoundland Vesper with my meal, after Jason ordered Oyster Bay white wine from New Zealand, I decided to err on the side of sobriety. I still had to pack Leonardo that night. As it was, I think I drank most of a bottle of wine that night, so I was a very good thing that my sister had acquired a bike box that opened from the side rather than the top. It was much easier to fit my bike into that box than it would have been with a more conventional box.

On the beach

Sorry if I have been a bit remiss in not updating the blog and writing more about my trip, but for some reason, I haven't been in the mood. I have also been having a bit of trouble uploading images into my blog that I think I have resolved. In a related note, I have started posting pictures for you to admire on the web at http://picasaweb.google.ca/moosebike

In any case, there was quite a party on the beach. The beach has a name that I have forgotten. Suffice to say that it is the beach in Norris Point that look out towards the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence. A bit vague but it describes it.

I was surprised to see some moose bones on the beach. I can't come up with any particular explanation for them but I assume there is one.
Jason, Mark, Alice and I kicked off the party with some bubbly.
Alice then got busy baking some cod wrapped in aluminum foil in the fire we built. Un-seen is the potato salad I had made earlier in the day. As the fish cooked, we sat around drinking beer and discussing life, the universe and everything.
Among other things, Jason told us how his lurcher (a type of dog) had caught a baby muntjac back in England. This resulted in a discussion about what a muntjac was (a type of very small deer) and what a possible muntjac-moose encounter would be like. It was that sort of party.Alice had invited any number of Norris Pointers. I can't really recall any of their names, except for Sheldon (who isn't this guy, I think) who worked as some sort of information officer for Gros Morne National Park. If I remember correctly, he designs displays for the park, as well as, keeping track of what the public opinion of the park is. One side effect of the this was that he had known about my moose sighting as I arrived in Norris Point. You see, he has software that picks up usage of the phrase "Gros Morne National Park" in newly posted webpages. As my arrival blog entry used that phrase, he had seen my blog entry. He had been going to pull my leg about it, but someone else had asked me about seeing moose before he could devise a conversational gambit. The Sun went down behind a headland. We drank some more beer and ate potato salad, chips and cod. Some more people showed up so we drank some more beer.
And then some more beer.After a while, the others drifted away leaving the hard core, i.e. Mark, Jason, Alice and myself. After a few more beer and a drunken attempt by Mark to put the fire out, Alice convinced him to go home.

Thing were getting quite relaxed and after a while I felt little inclination to actually sit up and so took photographs while lying down feeling very relaxed. I was half-tempted to sleep on the beach, but it simply wasn't comfortable.
This lead to my close encounter with the mooses.

On a possible critical mass of cyclists

Sorry if I haven't been writing in my blog lately. I am back at work and all that that entails. In addition, I have been working on editing the photos I took into a slideshow that I would like to have ready for this weekend.

Getting to the title and topic of this posting, I was impressed at the sheer number of cycle-commuters on the road today. The de Maisonneuve bike path was very busy. Unfortunately, it wasn't busy enough for the usual idiot pedestrians to take the hint and use the sidewalk. I sometimes think that Quebec is very close to nearing the tipping point in numbers of cyclists: if we get a bit more, maybe, just maybe, the traffic planners will have to get their act together and increase the priority of cyclists in their considerations.

One change that occurred while I was away on the de Maisonneuve bike path. Where de Maisonneuve crosses Decarie Blvd, there is a very awkward bit street layout that I have had to deal with on a regular, if not daily basis since 1999. As it was, there was no strictly legal and practical way to negotiate the area. In the near decade I have been going that way, I have figured out the best way to deal with this section of road. When I returned from my trip, there were markings on the road indicating that "my" method of geting past that point will be, more or less, the official way to dealing with that section. My pride in having good bike sense is nicely polished by this.

On close encounters with mooses

For the time being, I will leave out a detailed description of the beach party, except to say that it involved a beach, a bonfire and plenty of beer. A little after midnight on Friday, I left Alice and Jason on the beach to walk back to the house.

The house that Alice and Mark share is at the end of Hospital Lane. The closest house to it is at quite a distance, and the woods surround it. That night, still and quiet as it was, was quite beautiful, if a mite eerie to someone who has lived in a city for nearly ten years. Just past the last house, a movement on the left hand side of the road caught my eye.
There was a suggestion of a large shape in the darkness. Taking pictures using a flash revealed an eye in the darkness......and then two eyes.
In fact, there were two sets of eyes. In the poor light and my somewhat sozzled state, it took me a few moments to figure out just what was I was seeing: a cow moose...
... and its calf were browsing at the edge of the road!I wasn't quite sure of what the safe way to deal with them was, so I settled on trying to take a good picture of them with my digital camera while talking to the cow moose in a low voice.
Actually, I was just talking, and I doubt either moose was really appreciating that I didn't mean them any particular harm. However, the fact that they continued to nibble at the foliage suggested that they weren't terribly concerned by my presence.I managed to get fairly close to the mooses, bearing in mind that these photographs were taken using a 3x zoom.
The thing was, that while I didn't want to disturb them, they were in between myself and my bed. As the latter was calling, I moved slowly along the road, while politely trying to explain the the situation to the cow moose.
To be honest, I am not sure I would have felt quite comfortable if the mooses had stayed in one spot, and let me sidle past. Cow mooses can be quite protective of their young, and both of them outweighed me by a long shot. Consequently, it was probably a good thing that as I approached them, they moved down the road. For one thing, it brought them under a streetlight that allowed me to get a number of shots of them in without using the flash. This is probably the best of them.
As we arrived in Alice's and Mark's parking lot, the moose slipped into the shadows and disappeared.

The whole thing happened in an eerie quiet broken only by my speech and camera shutter sound. There was a decidedly dream-like quality to the event. I know it wasn't a dream as the pictures prove, but it had wonderfully cozy and dreamy feel to it. The fact that I had been dozing near the bonfire and was alcohol positive probably had something to do with it. Nonetheless, I now feel that the moose is my totem animal.

The fact that I am big and ungainly has only a little to do with it. ;-)

On my return

"Well, I'm back." to quote the last piece of dialog from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Less than twelve hours ago, I was standing on top of the Tablelands in Gros Morne National Park and now I'm back in Montreal. Much has happened since my last post involving bikes, beer, mooses, boats and more beer, but I think that the telling must wait for another day.

Joey LeBaron met me at the airport and drove my bike and me home. I was saddened to learn from her that Marion, the veteran cashier at the store had died while I was away. She was a character at the store, one you would have trouble putting into a story as your editor would tell you to tone the character down as no one cackles and jokes like that.

Joey asked me an interesting question: "How many days was I biking?" It took me a while but the answer came out as 25, though I will have to review my math and my notes before making a definitive statement. Odometer at the start was 1658.7 km. At the end, it was 3840.0, thus a little under 2200 km. Not bad, not bad at all.

After Norris Point, Montreal seems very big and overly full of people. It is also very muggy, but that should change by tomorrow. The projected highs and lows for the next few days are 21 and 9 respectively. These seem rather low for the season, but I really don't mind as I am something of a low temperature guy.

Work begins tomorrow, ugh!

On ponds and music

I began my exploration of Gros Morne park and area with what I thought would be a gentle stroll to the start of the lane with a cup of coffee. I had barely got past the cars when I spotted a tall ship going past through the trees. I rushed back inside and hurriedly collected my camera and other gear to pedal down to downtown Norris Point to be able to properly witness the ship.

She proved to be a three-master, with square sails on the foremast and fore and aft sails on the other masts. Precisely what this makes her in nautical terms, I don't know. She was the Caledonia and is said to be a regular (weekly) sight in these parts. The Caledonia appears to be of fairly modern construction judging by the location and shape of the wheelhouse. I also have this strange idea that she was in Halifax the last time I was there.

After admiring the tall ship (admittedly not under sail), I visited the Marine Station where I had the chance to see a two toned lobster, as in one side was a regular colour for lobsters and the other was a very bright orange. Very weird. I will illustrate this with an image when I get home.

I returned to the house and borrowed Mark's Jetta to go see Rocky Harbour. Before I got to the hospital, I met Alice and we went together to Rocky Harbour for lunch at Java Jack's. In the afternoon, we went on a boat tour of Western Brook Pond. This glacially carved valley is very stunning as well as being extremely evocative of mystery and adventure. The geology was admittedly fairly familiar to me, at least in theory. (You don't grow up the son of a glacial geologist without picking up some notions of geology.) However, the execution of this valley was incredible with many different types of cliff: smooth rocks, craggy rocks, cracked rocks, tree covered cliffs, and boulder fields. Absolutely stunning. (Pappy, you have to do this tour the next time you are here. You should also go see the Tablelands as well.)

That evening, Mark arrived with Alice's friend Jason who had just flown in from England. We then went to a pub in Rock Harbour for a night of maritime music with the Navigators. The experience would have been better had the sound system been better set up and not as loud. All the same, it is not just a myth that the Newfoundlanders, young and old, love their music, as young and old were dancing to the music.

Today, Jason and I moseyed around Norris Point, taking in the sights and generally being very relaxed in the fabulous weather. When Jason was going through security at Gatwick Airport, the agent had looked at his boarding card and inquired where was Deer Lake? Today, Jason was commenting that if people in the U.K. could see how nice it was in Norris Point, then his charter flight wouldn't have been mostly empty and would be a daily rather than weekly service. I pointed out that such good weather is relatively rare.

Tonight, we are going to make a bonfire on a nearby beach and cook fish over it. Hmm, do we have marshmallows?